Tenderfoot by Toni Jordan assessment – coming-of-age story has the makings of a basic | Books

In the suburbs of Brisbane, 1975, 12-year-old Andie Tanner lives along with her father, her mom and “four quiet souls … downstairs, underneath the house”: her father’s racing greyhounds. Her life is easy and complete, made up of her household, the streets of Morningside, her suburban major college and the canines – who Andie adores above all else.

Toni Jordan’s eighth novel, Tenderfoot, opens in a world constructed round these greyhounds; the kennels, the raised bench used for therapies, the kibble and powders, scales and leads and muzzles and collars. Andie’s mother and father are gamblers and to them playing is a “family legacy, an ideology of living”. But they practice their canines meticulously, a means of mastering likelihood in a recreation in any other case dominated by it. On the observe, the hounds resist the legal guidelines of nature; “to them, gravity means nothing. They hover … are streaks of light; they are life, flashing before your eyes.”

For Andie, impatient for her personal life to start, the world is filled with ready and of longing: ready “for the boxes to open … for the race to begin”; eager for the longer term through which she will turn into a greyhound coach herself. At college, she is intelligent and well mannered; a rule-follower. But she quickly learns that the foundations gained’t all the time preserve her protected. When she is shunned by her pals, Andie throws herself right into a quest to get well her classmate’s lacking cat, Macavity, sure this can win again the love of her friends. But as she struggles to navigate the labyrinth of childhood friendships, her life at residence begins to disintegrate as effectively.

Told via alternating views of grownup narrator and little one protagonist, Andie’s story revolves round her relationship along with her mother and father: her lovely, exhausted, typically irritable mom, and her mild however unreliable father. They are deeply advanced characters and Jordan’s portrayal of struggling adults who strive their finest and but typically fail their critical, overly accountable little one is sharp and empathetic. “After your parents are gone,” Andie displays from the attitude of maturity, “you realise that inside you and everyone you know … is a child – fallible and wounded, and wrong about so many things.”

Andie tells us that “childhood is as much a place as it is a time” and Jordan renders this place with extraordinary readability and precision. Her spare, trustworthy prose captures the confusion of being 12: a combination of earnestness and vulnerability, competence and helplessness. Tenderfoot honours the naivety of its little one narrator with out softening the world’s edges and I felt a creeping terror for Andie as she is compelled to navigate this world alone. “Maturity does not rise smoothly like water filling a tank,” Jordan writes. “Instead, our coming of age is a jerky, unpredictable process, a wild tide coming in on a ragged beach.”

As she narrates from a long time sooner or later, Andie is each the woman she was – earnest, hopeful, clever past her years – and the girl she’s turn into, bearing the load of what she’s discovered. “When you’re small, the world comes into focus like a polaroid: smudged and indistinct, taking years to resolve into clarity,” Andie displays. Tenderfoot itself appears like such a picture – a snapshot of a lady on the cusp of change, caught between what she is aware of, what she longs for and what the world delivers as an alternative.

Jordan is deeply delicate to social class and group. The racetrack, as Andie’s father insists, is a superb leveller: “Rich or poor, teenager or pensioner, new Australian or old, at the dogs, everyone is equal.” But equality is fragile in a world structured by likelihood. At her first job on the TAB, Andie serves strains of punters “trapped in a prison of their own making”. Betting embodies the paradox of playing: the dream of freedom is chained to the inevitability of loss. Andie loves this group, the individuals she’s grown up round. She is certainly one of them. But because the story progresses she begins to see not solely what the observe guarantees but in addition what it prices.

Above all, Tenderfoot grapples with the complexity of human behaviour. “The truth is,” Andie says, “greyhounds are two animals at the same time … the gentlest of animals unless you are a small furry creature. It’s simplistic to think that people are either good or bad. People behave the same way dogs do.” The duality of individuals, all the time able to cruelty and tenderness in equal measure, is what animates Jordan’s novel and what makes Andie’s story so peculiar and so devastatingly recognisable.

With its exact prose and stability of immediacy and hindsight, Tenderfoot has the makings of an Australian basic: a novel about household, loss and the ghosts of who we as soon as had been and who we’d turn into.